Investigating the Impact of Using Syntactic Structures on Sentence-Meaning in English Language

Abstract

This study under the title “Investigating the Impact of Using Some Syntactic Structures on Sentence-Meaning in English Language” is a descriptive and and an experimental study that contains 5 chapters which has employed pre and post tests for the targeted second year secondary school students of some private and government schools in Khartoum State who learn English as a foreign language, in addition to a questionnaire for some teachers and supervisors who work in the in the field of English language teaching and learning to know about their opinions on this problem. And post to conducting the tests and the questionnaire to the targeted students, teachers and supervisors, the results from both of them have been collected and analyzed to know the reasons behind these inappropriate usages. And post to analyzing the results the researcher has found out that some the inappropriate usages of syntactic structures are due to the influence of their mother tongue “Arabic”, whereas, some of that reasons why these students use some syntactic structures inappropriately are because of the fact that “Arabic” the students’ mother tongue and the foreign language being learnt “English” have different systems for Head + Modifier, in addition to the fact that some students tend to over generalize some grammatical rules, another reason is that sometimes there are no equivalents for some English rules in the their mother tongue “Arabic”. One more reason is that some English language teachers do not use appropriate methods or techniques for teaching syntactic structures. And after reaching the above mentioned results, the researcher has suggested a number of recommendations to lessen the frequency of these errors and also the best way to deal with them. Along with some suggestions for further studies.